VC roundup: Centrifuge, Crypto Valley Exchange, Nebra lock in funding rounds

Venture capital (VC) investors kept busy this past week as Centrifuge, Crypto Valley Exchange and Nebra all clinched new rounds of funding.

Crypto Valley Exchange

The $7-million funding round consisted of pre-seed and seed rounds. Fabric Ventures and Kyber Capital Crypto Fund co-led the effort.

Crypto Valley Exchange also drew support from notable backers like AMDAX, Wave Digital, Funfair Ventures, and the Seier Capital Family Office, among others.

CVEX is set to offer a decentralized exchange (DEX) catering to crypto enthusiasts, aiming to provide transparent and cost-effective futures and options trading. One of its features includes specialized bid-offer dynamics that the company hopes will work better than existing trading platforms.

Regarding its upcoming mainnet launch, scheduled for this summer on Arbitrum (ARB), CVEX stated it will include enhanced trading features compatible with user wallets across Ethereum (ETH), Optimism (OP), and Solana (SOL).

With nearly 160,000 users already signed up for early access during its testnet phase, the team behind CVEX hopes it could disrupt the derivatives market landscape. 

We’re bringing established risk approaches on-chain, allowing proper risk management and real hedging strategies to be applied, which will open up defi derivatives to everyone from degens to big institutions and facilitate much greater volumes of trading liquidity.

James Davies, Chief Product Officer, CVEX

Centrifuge

In other funding news, Centrifuge, a leading platform for on-chain finance, also announced a substantial $15 million Series A funding round.

The round, which was oversubscribed and supported by a diverse array of investors, is considered a pivotal moment for Centrifuge’s journey toward establishing itself as the go-to platform for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.

Centrifuge plans to launch an institutional-grade lending market for RWAs on the Base layer-2 network, which it also plans to integrate with Coinbase Verification.

According to the company, the initiative is meant to enable swift and secure onboarding for institutions seeking exposure to real-world assets, and it will also provide instant liquidity and lending options against asset holdings.

Nebra

Blockchain and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) research platform Nebra made headlines after securing $4.5 million in investment in their pre-seed and seed rounds.

Nascent and Bankless Ventures led the charge.

According to Nebra, the funding round included participation from several angel investors, including Tim Beiko, Kartik Talwar, and Nick White, among others.

The organization said it hopes the infusion of capital will help it create a “shared settlement layer” for web3. The layer could help reduce proof settlement costs on major blockchains, including Ethereum.

Nascent co-founder Dan Elitzer likened Nebra’s approach to advancing blockchain ZKP settlements to how major technology companies like Google and Uber aggregated resources in their respective fields to change how those sectors work.

Just as Google revolutionized information access by aggregating internet data and Uber transformed urban mobility by aggregating transportation resources, Nebra is pioneering a new approach to bring economies of scale in blockchain ZKP settlement.

Dan Elitzer, Nascent co-founder

Nebra, Elitzer says, is pioneering a similarly groundbreaking approach to bringing economies of scale to blockchain settlements.

During the first quarter of 2024, global investors put $2.5 billion into crypto-related startups, according to PitchBook.